Custom and Myth

Page: 92

Anyone who will look through a collection of Australian weapons and
utensils will be brought to this conclusion. The shields and the
clubs are elaborately worked, but almost always without any representation
of plants, animals, or the human figure. As a rule the decorations
take the simple shape of the ‘herring-bone’ pattern, or
such other patterns as can be produced without the aid of spirals, or
curves, or circles. There is a natural and necessary cause of
this choice of decoration. The Australians, working on hard wood,
with tools made of flint, or broken glass, or sharp shell, cannot easily
produce any curved lines. Everyone who, when a boy, carved his
name on the bark of a tree, remembers the difficulty he had with S and
G, while he got on easily with letters like M and A, which consist of
straight or inclined lines. The savage artist has the same difficulty
with his rude tools in producing anything like satisfactory curves or
spirals. We engrave above (Fig. 1) a shield on which an Australian
has succeeded, with obvious difficulty, in producing concentric ovals
of irregular shape. It may be that the artist would have produced
perfect circles if he could. His failure is exactly like that
of a youthful carver of inscriptions coming to grief over his G’s
and S’s. Here, however (Fig. 2), we have three shields which,
like the ancient Celtic pipkin (the tallest of the three figures in
Fig. 3), show the earliest known form of savage decorative art—the
forms which survive under the names of ‘chevron’ and ‘herring-bone.’
These can be scratched on clay with the nails, or a sharp stick, and
this primeval way of decorating pottery made without the wheel survives,
with other relics of savage art, in the western isles of Scotland.
The Australian had not even learned to make rude clay pipkins, but he
decorated his shields as the old Celts and modern old Scotch women decorated
their clay pots, with the herring-bone arrangement of incised lines.
In the matter of colour the Australians prefer white clay and red ochre,
which they rub into the chinks in the woodwork of their shields.
When they are determined on an ambush, they paint themselves all over
with white, justly conceiving that their sudden apparition in this guise
will strike terror into the boldest hearts. But arrangements in
black and white of this sort scarcely deserve the name of even rudimentary
art.

The Australians sometimes introduce crude decorative attempts at
designing the human figure, as in the pointed shield opposite (Fig.
2, a), which, with the other Australian designs, are from Mr.
Brough Smyth’s ‘Aborigines of Victoria.’ But
these ambitious efforts usually end in failure. Though the Australians
chiefly confine themselves to decorative art, there are numbers of wall-paintings,
so to speak, in the caves of the country which prove that they, like
the Bushmen, could design the human figure in action when they pleased.
Their usual preference for the employment of patterns appears to me
to be the result of the nature of their materials. In modern art
our mechanical advantages and facilities are so great that we are always
carrying the method and manner of one art over the frontier of another.
Our poetry aims at producing the effects of music; our prose at producing
the effects of poetry. Our sculpture tries to vie with painting
in the representation of action, or with lace-making in the production
of reticulated surfaces, and so forth. But the savage, in his
art, has sense enough to confine himself to the sort of work for which
his materials are fitted. Set him in the bush with no implements
and materials but a bit of broken shell and a lump of hard wood, and
he confines himself to decorative scratches. Place the black in
the large cave which Pundjel, the Australian Zeus, inhabited when on
earth (as Zeus inhabited the cave in Crete), and give the black plenty
of red and white ochre and charcoal, and he will paint the human figure
in action on the rocky walls. Later, we will return to the cave-paintings
of the Australians and the Bushmen in South Africa. At present
we must trace purely decorative art a little further. But we must
remember that there was once a race apparently in much the same social
condition as the Australians, but far more advanced and ingenious in
art. The earliest men of the European Continent, about whom we
know much, the men whose bones and whose weapons are found beneath the
gravel-drift, the men who were contemporary with the rhinoceros, mammoth,
and cave-bear, were not further advanced in material civilisation than
the Australians. They used weapons of bone, of unpolished stone,
and probably of hard wood. But the remnants of their art, the
scraps of mammoth or reindeer bone in our museums, prove that they had
a most spirited style of sketching from the life. In a collection
of drawings on bone (probably designed with a flint or a shell), drawings
by palæolithic man, in the British Museum, I have only observed
one purely decorative attempt. Even in this the decoration resembles
an effort to use the outlines of foliage for ornamental purposes.
In almost all the other cases the palæolithic artist has not decorated
his bits of bone in the usual savage manner, but has treated his bone
as an artist treats his sketch-book, and has scratched outlines of beasts
and fishes with his sharp shell as an artist uses his point. These
ancient bones, in short, are the sketch-books of European savages, whose
untaught skill was far greater than that of the Australians, or even
of the Eskimo. When brought into contact with Europeans, the Australian
and Eskimo very quickly, even without regular teaching, learn to draw
with some spirit and skill. In the Australian stele, or grave-pillar,
which we have engraved (Fig. 4), the shapeless figures below the men
and animals are the dead, and the boilyas or ghosts. Observe
the patterns in the interstices. The artist had lived with Europeans.
In their original conditions, however, the Australians have not attained
to such free, artist-like, and unhampered use of their rude materials
as the mysterious European artists who drew the mammoth that walked
abroad amongst them.

We have engraved one solitary Australian attempt at drawing curved
lines. The New Zealanders, a race far more highly endowed, and,
when Europeans arrived amongst them, already far more civilised than
the Australians, had, like the Australians, no metal implements.
But their stone weapons were harder and keener, and with these they
engraved the various spirals and coils on hard wood, of which we give
examples here. It is sometimes said that New Zealand culture and
art have filtered from some Asiatic source, and that in the coils and
spirals designed, as in our engravings, on the face of the Maori chief,
or on his wooden furniture, there may be found debased Asiatic influences.
{286} This
is one of the questions which we can hardly deal with here. Perhaps
its solution requires more of knowledge, anthropological and linguistic,
than is at present within the reach of any student. Assuredly
the races of the earth have wandered far, and have been wonderfully
intermixed, and have left the traces of their passage here and there
on sculptured stones, and in the keeping of the ghosts that haunt ancient
grave-steads. But when two pieces of artistic work, one civilised,
one savage, resemble each other, it is always dangerous to suppose that
the resemblance bears witness to relationship or contact between the
races, or to influences imported by one from the other. New Zealand
work may be Asiatic in origin, and debased by the effect of centuries
of lower civilisation and ruder implements. Or Asiatic ornament
may be a form of art improved out of ruder forms, like those to which
the New Zealanders have already attained. One is sometimes almost
tempted to regard the favourite Maori spiral as an imitation of the
form, not unlike that of a bishop’s crozier at the top, taken
by the great native ferns. Examples of resemblance, to be accounted
for by the development of a crude early idea, may be traced most easily
in the early pottery of Greece. No one says that the Greeks borrowed
from the civilised people of America. Only a few enthusiasts say
that the civilised peoples of America, especially the Peruvians, are
Aryan by race. Yet the remains of Peruvian palaces are often by
no means dissimilar in style from the ‘Pelasgic’ and ‘Cyclopean’
buildings of gigantic stones which remain on such ancient Hellenic sites
as Argos and Mycenæ. The probability is that men living
in similar social conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously
and unintentionally arrived at like results.